The Cathedral of Learning & Its Nationality Rooms

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Pittsburgh has some of the most convoluted street patterns I’ve ever driven through. It’s as if a few grids were thrown at random among the hilly terrain, sort of meeting each other in places, with additional streets — some large, some alley-like — crossing the grids at all angles, plus oddball five- and six-way intersections punctuating things. You know, like Boston, only with more hills.

But also more street signs. And fewer lunatics behind the wheel. At least that was my impression, admittedly based on a small sample, as I figured out how to get from place to place. So driving in Pittsburgh wasn’t actually that bad, certainly better than Boston, despite its initial challenges.

Our car has GPS with spoken instructions. I decided to try it on the first morning in town. Pittsburgh managed to flummox the system early in the game. That is, it was unable to give me directions that I could use in a timely manner. Maybe I misunderstood. Doesn’t matter — I found the system annoying, so I quit using it. I went back to consulting maps.

Still, the system’s misdirection, or my misunderstanding, at one point led us through the Liberty Tunnel. Earlier we’d gone through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Pittsburgh might have some great bridges — more about which later — but it also has some really cool tunnels to drive through.

Our second major destination on the first day was the University of Pittsburgh, which is in the city’s Oakland neighborhood. Besides the Heinz Memorial Chapel, we also wanted to go there to see the Cathedral of Learning, which is a 42-story building. Despite the uncertainties of navigating through the Pittsburgh streets — the GPS voice was silenced by then — I knew I was in the right place when I saw a tall neo-Gothic building rising above everything else around it.

Not that Oakland is lacking for other large structures, just nothing else that tall. In fact the district impressed me as practically a city of its own, with its university buildings, healthcare facilities, sizable apartment buildings, a rich array of retail, some green space and a lot of people out and about. We probably could have spent an entire satisfying day in Oakland.

Even a few blocks away, the Cathedral of Learning makes an impression.

Charles Klauder, the same architect who designed the Heinz Memorial Chapel, did the considerably taller Cathedral as well. Both are Indiana limestone edifices.
Inside are classrooms and administrative offices, but that hardly describes the place. The soaring, four-story lobby could, if anyone wanted to do it, be decked out as a neo-Gothic church.
Something like the Heinz Memorial Chapel. Since the two structures were built at about the same time and designed by the same architect, that’s not much of a surprise.

What really makes the Cathedral of Learning distinctive are its 31 Nationality Rooms, most of which are working classrooms, but each designed to reflect a nationality that had an influence on Pittsburgh’s history.

They’re on the first and third floors. We spent time on the third floor looking at such examples as the Korean Room, based on the 14th-century Myeong-nyundang (Hall of Enlightenment), the main building at the Sungkyunkwan in Seoul.
It was completed only in 2015 by Korean carpenters who built it in that country, took it apart and shipped it to the university, where it was reassembled.

The Japanese Room.
Built in 1999 to evoke residence of an important village leader in a farm village in the mid-18th century in the Kinki district.

The Armenian Room, dating from 1988. Most impressive.
Inspired by the 10th- to 12th-century Sanahin Monastery in Aremenia, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up.

Also impressive, and probably-not-by-accident on the other side of the building from the Armenian Room, is the Turkish Room, completed in 2012.
In the style of a main room of a 14th-century Turkish house, but also sporting a picture of Ataturk near the entrance (he’s teaching the Turkish nation the Latin alphabet).

My favorite, I think: the Indian Room, completed in 2000. This is the view from the lectern.
A closeup of the columns, decorated with rosettes, swags, and fruit.
The style is a 4th- to 9th-century courtyard from Nalanda University, a Buddhist monastic university. I had to look that up as well.

There might be a lectern, but I can imagine that professors might not spend much time behind it, but rather pace up and down the rose brick floor to more closely converse with the students, who are facing each other.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

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Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

The Duquesne Incline

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A hundred years ago, hilly Pittsburgh had a lot of operational funiculars: the Castle Shannon Incline, Castle Shannon South Incline, Duquesne Incline, Knoxville Incline, Monongahela Incline, Monongahela Freight Incline, Mount Oliver Incline, Norwood Incline, Penn Incline, and the St. Clair Incline.

Yet others had already come and gone by then: the Bellevue Incline, Clifton Incline, Fort Pitt Incline, H.B. Hays and Brothers Coal Railroad, Nunnery Hill Incline, Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Plane, Ridgewood Incline and the Troy Hill Incline.

That’s enough for a whole chapter of a coffee table book: Great Funiculars of the World, a sequel to Great Elevators of Europe. The designer of most of them was one man, Samuel Diescher, a Hungarian who came to America in 1866 and did an exceptional number of engineering projects during his career.

Only two funiculars survive in 21st-century Pittsburgh, the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela Incline, about a mile apart on the slopes of Mt. Washington, to the south of downtown. We couldn’t come to Pittsburgh and not ride at least one of them, and so on mid-morning of July 5, we drove to the Duquesne’s lower-level parking lot and climbed the stairs on the left for access to the funicular.

The Duquesne, in operation since 1877 and restored in 1963, rises about 400 feet.
Round-trip for ages 12 to 64 is $5, and completely worth it. Though part of Pittsburgh’s transit system, on a quasi-holiday in summer, tourists seemed to be the main customers.
At the top is a splendid view of downtown Pittsburgh and the three rivers and their bridges, though things were a little hazy that morning. No matter.
A few minutes’ walk to the west of the top of the Duquesne is the small Point of View Park. Besides offering roughly the same view of downtown, the view from the park down the Ohio is nice.
The park also features two bronzes in a curiously intimate pose: George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta by local artist James A. West (2006).
A nearby plaque says that “this bronze depicts a meeting in October 1770 between [Washington and Guyasuta]… this work captures a moment in time between two formidable men whose actions had a huge impact on Pittsburgh…”

Looking closely at the Wiki entry on Guyasuta, I see this detail about his name: “The many spelling variations include Guyashuta, Guyasoota, Guy-a-soot-er, Guyasootha, Guyasotha, Guyasutha, Kayashota, Kayasota, Kayasutha, Keyashuta, Kiasota, Kiashuta, Kiasutha, Kiosola, Kiyashuta, and Kyasoota.”

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

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We arrived at Cuyahoga Valley National Park at about noon on July 4 under a hot and copper Ohio sky. Luckily, both of the places we visited in the park were well shaded. The Cuyahoga Valley, hugging the Cuyahoga River south of Cleveland and north of Akron, is a lush place in summer.

First we took a short but pleasant walk on a boardwalk trail to see the Brandywine Falls.
Soon you come to a series of stairs that takes you to an observation deck near the 65-foot falls, which were carved by Brandywine Creek.
A popular place on a summer holiday.
Curiously, even though it’s between two close-by urban centers, Cuyahoga Valley NP as a whole isn’t a top 10 national park in terms of visitor count. It’s no. 13, with just over 2 million visitors in 2018. That might be because it gets a share of visitors from Cleveland and other parts of Ohio, but not as many from elsewhere. People travel to see the Great Smoky Mountains or the Grand Canyon, for instance, but probably not so many to see Cuyahoga Valley.

As long ago as 1814, a saw mill was built to use the power of the falls, and at other times grist mills were on site, part of a village that existed in the area in the 19th century. Almost all of those structures are long gone, though above the falls, ruins of a small factory from the early 20th century remain.
The structure housed the Champion Electric Co., which made small electric appliances. Lightning started a fire that burned it down in 1937.

After lunch we went to take a walk on the Ledges Trail, which is in the Virginia Kendall unit of the park.
In full, the formations are called the Ritchie Ledges, which geologists say were made from a substance called Sharon Conglomerate millions of years ago. I’ll take their word for it, since my geologic knowledge is paltry. But I do know that it makes for a intriguing trail that isn’t too hard to walk, though it does have its bumpy moments.

The trail starts at the top of the ledges.

Then it winds down to the bottom of the ledges.
The trees weren’t the only greenery.

The Ledges Trail wasn’t as crowded as the trail to the Brandywine Waterfall, but there were a few other people.

A side trail traversed a narrow pass.
At one point there’s a shortcut formed by stone stairs. Who built them? The CCC, naturally.

Before I visited the park, I hadn’t known that Cuyahoga Valley is a fairly recent national park, receiving that status only in 2000. Before that, it was a National Recreation Area, but only since 1974. Guess the region got that designation after the infamous fire, one of a series over the decades, that burned 50 years ago on the lower reaches of the Cuyahoga at some distance from today’s national park.

Pittsburgh ’19

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Independence Day fell on a Thursday this year, creating a four-day window of opportunity to go somewhere. So late on the afternoon of July 3 we headed east, spending the night near Toledo, Ohio. On the 4th, we drove on to Pittsburgh, where we spent three nights and two full days, returning after an all-day drive today.

We stayed at a hotel in the pleasant Moon Township, Pa., not far from Pittsburgh International Airport. The days were hot and steamy and punctuated by vigorous rainfall in the afternoons — supposedly typical for western Pennsylvania in July, though it was a lot like home this summer. Anyway, even occasional heavy downpours didn’t slow us down much.

The road from metro Chicago to Pittsburgh, if you take the Indiana East-West Toll Road and then the Ohio Turnpike, takes you smack through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We spend a few hours walking its trails on July 4 as a stopover on the way to Pittsburgh.

Getting up early(ish) on July 5, we first went to the Duquesne Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s two funiculars, and rode it up and down. At the top we took in the hazy morning view of the city and the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. My thinking about funiculars: when you find one, ride it. My thinking about the Monongahela: that’s just a damned fun name to say.

Next we drove to the Oakland neighborhood and spent time at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, the Heinz Memorial Chapel — the church that ketchup built — and the Cathedral of Learning and some of its highly artful, internationally themed rooms, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Lunch on the first day was at the the Original Oyster House on Market Square, which is known as Pittsburgh’s oldest bar and restaurant, and which serves up a mighty fine array of seafood. From there we repaired to Point State Park at the meeting of the rivers, site of a French and then British fort in the days before American independence, and the seed of modern Pittsburgh. That’s also where our lengthy guided walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh began, which took up the rest of the afternoon.

That should have been enough for the first day, but our momentum carried us on to the Andy Warhol Museum for a few hours in the early evening, taking advantage of its longer hours on Fridays. A suburban location of Primanti Bros., a local chain, provided a hearty dinner that night.

The second day, July 6, wasn’t quite as busy, but we got around. Late in the morning, we took an extensive tour of Carrie Furnace, a hulk of a former blast furnace complex on the Monongahela. It reminded me greatly of the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, though the scale was even larger. After all, Birmingham was the Pittsburgh of the South, not the other way around.

After lunch in a nondescript but decent Chinese restaurant, we visited the Frick Pittsburgh, whose grounds include his mansion, a museum with his art, a greenhouse, and a carriage and antique auto exhibit. We saw the greenhouse and the auto exhibit.

After treating ourselves to some hipster ice cream late in the afternoon, we went to one more place, despite thunder and rain: Randyland.
Randyland

It’s the kind of outsider art phantasmagoria beloved by the likes of Roadside America or the Atlas Obscura. For good reason. As Roadside America puts it, the place is a “circus-colored oasis of sunny vibes on Pittsburgh’s formerly grim North Side.”

High Summer Hiatus

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Saw a few fireflies the other day, a certain sign of that nebulous period, high summer. The days might be getting shorter, but you don’t notice that yet — like the long moment at the top of ballistic trajectory. Back to posting around July 7.

Usually I rely on rain to wash my car or, if absolutely necessary, a hosing down on a warm day. But after our recent summertime jaunt to central Illinois-Indiana, enough bugs had met their insectoid maker against the leading edge of my car that I ponied up for an automated car wash. Half price ($5), though, since I had a coupon.

I find the journey through the car wash, at less than two minutes, visually and sonically interesting. I get that for my money, besides the removal of bug splatter.

So I held my camera as steady as possible during the splashing and blooping and hissing and flapping, along with elements of a minor light show.

The dog spent some time this morning trading insults with a resident squirrel. At least that’s how I want to think of it. The dog spotted a squirrel in the major back yard tree around 9 and immediately started looking up and whining at it, as she often does. Soon the squirrel was making its own noise, something like a duck with laryngitis.

Age has slowed her (the dog) down a little, but not yet when it comes to guarding the back yard against other creatures. Earlier this year, she spent time trying to scratch through the deck to reach what I suspect was a brood of possums. They seem to be gone now, since that dog behavior has stopped for now.

Chanced on a site called Yarn the other day that purports to offer a search “by word or phrase for TV, movies, and music clips.” So I decided to test it.

Why that phrase? Just popped into my head like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Ax vs. Axe

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The entirety of a press release I got yesterday for no particular good reason, except maybe a robot read this posting and put my name on a list:

What: Accelerate Axe Throwing will host world champion axe thrower Ben Edgington for a free demo and clinic, helping experts and newbies alike improve their game in this fast-growing sport. Sanctioned by the World Axe Throwing League (WATL).

Who: Ben Edgington of Denver, Colorado is the world’s greatest axe thrower, having won the WATL 2018 World Axe Throwing Championship. Axe throwers from every continent except Antarctica competed for the trophy: a (you guessed it) very sharp, impressive axe. In just one year, Ben went from unemployed to landing a job as an axe coach (which he had never done) to world champ. With a name like Edgington, some would say it’s what he was born to do.

One thing leads to another, as always, so I wasted a few minutes looking further into Mr. Edgington. Here’s a video about him. The funniest thing about that clip is the presence of Mr. Peanut in the axe-throwing space. Guess that’s because of corporate sponsorship.

Also, I wondered — but I’m not going investigate this further, I have a life to live — about the deliberations on whether to name the organization the World Axe Throwing League or the World Ax Throwing League. Opinions might be sharply divided (haw-haw) on the matter.

AP prefers “ax” but most other sources say either variation is valid. If it came to blows among axe (ax) aficionados about the spelling, things could get a mite bloody.

Nihil Aeternum Est, Shoe Edition

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Rain and more rain. Lush grass. But at least the temps now seem to be 70 F or higher all the time, as befitting summer. Not that this weekend was “the beginning of summer.” Just the solstice.

Saturday was clear and warm, and I picked out these shoes for the day.
I’d acquired them in March at a resale shop, where they looked only a bit worn, but had forgotten about them until I was looking through a pile of shoes on Saturday, finding them in a small bag with the receipt still inside (the only reason I knew when I bought them). Most of the shoes in this house — the vast majority — are not mine. If I could acquire two pairs of shoes, one formal, one for comfortable walks, that would last the rest of my life, I would do that.

Of course, I can’t do that because shoes wear out. Sometimes I buy new, sometimes at resale, though that’s tricky, since my size is a little large. Anyway, I wore the pictured shoes during a drive to another suburb and for a little walking around. Not far at all — maybe half an hour walking all together, if that, plus time sitting.

As I drove home, the bottom of one of the shoes felt a little odd. Since I was driving, I couldn’t inspect them closely. When I got home, I did.

The sole of one had almost completely separated from the rest of the shoe.
Just like that. I didn’t kick anything violently or bang the shoe on a table Khrushchev style or do anything else that might account for a sudden separation.

I neglected to check the brand, but I did note that the shoes were made in Portugal. Make what you will of that. For all I know, Portugal has a reputation for the worst shoes in the EU. Or maybe it just exports the weaker product out of the euro-zone.

The person who owned the shoes before me probably wore them exactly to their natural limit and then, luckless me, I bought the one-hoss shay the day before it fell apart. Then again, I think I spent all of $4, so the loss wasn’t vast.

Getting Around Europe, Summer 1983

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June 3, English Channel

Woke and had a good breakfast at our Harvich [England] B&B. After some confusion caught a bus to the Parkeston Quay, where we had no trouble boarding a huge ferry, the Prinz Oberon. It had five decks, with shops and restaurants for the elite, a cafeteria for the everyone else. We ate in the cafeteria — I had some industrial white fish — and then watched a sweet and sour Bert Reynolds movie, Best Friends, in the ship’s tiny movie house. As usual, Bert Reynolds can’t act.

Afterward Rich and I had a talk with a 10-year-old English boy named John, who knew all sorts of dirty jokes, and told us them. He had his Dutch mother with him, who habitually closed one eye when she talked, which was mostly about the perils of Amsterdam. Things aren’t what they used to be, everybody’s nasty now, etc.

June 16, Lüneburg, West Germany, to Copenhagen

At 12:30, Rich, Steve and I went to the youth travel agency and they told us, and we somehow understood, that the next train to Copenhagen was in 50 minutes or so. We bought tickets and dashed off to the bahnhof. And I mean dashed — Rich was worried about getting lost on the way and Steve had to meet us there, because he had to meet French Girl for a moment about something or other. I wonder that we ever got on the train, but we did.

For a while we were on the wrong car. Only some of the cars are put on the ferry, like a snake swallowing mice. One of the conductors told us that, and we went to the right car with a few minutes to spare. The crossing was brief, but we didn’t know that, so we ordered lunch. We had to eat fast.

Arrived in Copenhagen, spent some time figuring the subway out, then rode to part way toward a hostel we knew to be nearly out of town. Then we walked the rest of the way, only to find they had no space. But the kindly clerk at the hostel recommended another place that did have room — near the main train station we had just come from. We took a bus back into the city. Beds were available at the close-in hostel.

July 1, Lüneburg to Bremen

Rode a morning train from Lüneburg to Hamburg-Harburg. Some punkish fellows sat across from me: colorful pants & leather jackets with steel studs & short, almost crewcut hair with a mandatory earring each. One wore a digital watch.

At Hamburg-Harburg, I had 40 minutes to wait. I met a fellow, more conventionally dressed and only a little older than I am, who spoke British English so well I wasn’t sure whether he was British or German for a few minutes. Turned out he was from near Lübeck. His book for the ride was an English-language edition of The Lord of the Rings. The German translation, he told me, is “rubbish.” We talked about a number of other things as well. He told me he didn’t like the prospect of Pershing IIs stationed in West Germany, but he thought they were necessary.

July 14, Vienna to Rome

In the afternoon, we boarded our train. In my compartment was a family of four Hungarians and an Italian. Slept on a top bunk from 10 to 7 or so. Sometime in the night we crossed the border and so I woke in Italy. By that point no one had asked for a passport or a ticket. Arrived Rome at about 2. No one ever did ask for a passport, but the conductor eventually got around to checking my ticket.

July 22, Campania, Italy

Steve and I boarded the bus to Avellino in mid-morning yesterday and I remember having a fine ride – no hint of things to come. The Campanian scenery was pleasant, a lot of rolling countryside, though the air was more polluted than I would have expected. We got to Avellino, expecting to find a station, but instead a large parking lot full of buses functioning as the station. We asked a driver which bus connected with our destination, Mirabella, the small town where Steve has relatives, and he told us where to wait for it.

I felt nauseated in the hot sun waiting for the connecting bus. That bus wasn’t especially late — a notable thing in Italy — and my condition got worse during the bouncing, twist-and-turn ride deeper into the country (for Mirabella is a very small town). We arrived at a street corner in Mirabella, and immediately after unloading our packs from under the bus, I said to Steve, “I think I’m going to throw up.” Which I did right away. First on the sidewalk, then another wave in the gutter.

July 30, Florence to Innsbruck

The midnight train out of Italy was, of course, crowded, but at least we found seats. We had to disturb a mother and daughter already asleep to get those seats, and then more people boarded the car. After Bologna, the rest of the night passed more quickly than I expected in a fitful sleep sitting up, and by daylight I woke up tired in the Italian Alps. It was a good sight after the flatter, dustier parts of Italy we’d passed through earlier. Arrived Innsbruck about 9. Mucked around the station a while and then walked no short distance to a hostel run by a small church.

Aug 7, Down The Rhine

Today we took a slow boat down the Rhine. As good as it sounds. We started out this morning on the train to Mainz. Unfortunately, we forgot to change trains, and so ended up in Frankfort. But no problem. A friendly Ⓘ staffer helped us find a train to Rüdesheim, where we waited for the boat to Koblenz.

At this point, the Rhine cuts through steep hills, all very green and many overgrown with grapes. Castles stand on a few of the hills. We sat on the pea-green deck under a warm afternoon sun, watching the hills and castles pass by and listening to the other passengers, mostly children at play on the deck. Now that was an afternoon.

Mabery Gelvin Botanical Gardens

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RIP, Bernie Judge. He was an old-school Chicago newspaperman and my boss 30 years ago. Not a mentor, exactly, but I did learn a few things from him — most of which I didn’t appreciate until later.

By last Sunday morning, the rain had stopped and we visited the Mabery Gelvin Botanical Gardens in Mahomet, Illinois, not far outside Champaign.
At eight acres, the garden isn’t large, but it is a pretty place in June.
Mabery Gelvin Botanical GardensMabery Gelvin Botanical GardensFeaturing the blooming Dogwood (Cornus kousa).
A Saucer Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana). The South doesn’t get all the magnolias. According to the sign next to the tree, “… the genus magnolia is 95 million years old. Older than bees, they are pollinated by beetles.”
Japanese lilac (Syringa reticulata).
The garden is part of the larger Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve. We took a walk along some of its trails, eventually coming to a covered bridge: Lake of the Woods Covered Bridge. Wooden construction, but also with hidden steel support to make it vehicle-worthy.
Lake of the Woods Forest PreserveLake of the Woods Forest PreserveIt isn’t one of the 19th-century bridges you find in the Midwest. Rather, vintage 1965. As the park district says: “After the purchase of an 80-acre tract of land west of the Sangamon River in the 1960s, the Lake of the Woods Covered Bridge was constructed to connect the two sides of Lake of the Woods Forest Preserve in Mahomet. Designed by German Gurfinkel, a Civil Engineering instructor at the University of Illinois, the bridge was a replica of the Pepperel Bridge [sic] near Boston.”

The view from the bridge of the Sangamon River, which flows on to Springfield and then to the Illinois River.
We walked across the bridge. You should cross bridges when you come to them, if possible. Before we left the forest preserve, we also drove across it, because we don’t get to drive across covered bridges that much.